Oct. 18, 2018 -The Dusky Gopher Frog, once endemic to the longleaf pine savannas of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana — and now listed among the 100 most endangered species on earth — is tiny, dark and warty. The creature is often described as both secretive and shockingly loud, with a rumbling, back-of-the-throat mating call that is uncannily close to the human snore. It hides from the sun almost its whole life, finding shelter in burned-out tree stumps. And although it’s armed against danger (its glands secrete poison), in the presence of a predator, the three-inch-long frog lifts its front legs to cover its eyes, like a child pretending to be invisible: You can’t see it if it can’t see you.

Sept. 20,2018 -Urged on by the oil and gas industry, the Trump administration is moving to drastically weaken the Endangered Species Act. But the act, writes a former U.S. Interior Secretary, has saved hundreds of species that might now be extinct, while allowing for well-managed development.

Since taking office, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke has set out to eviscerate the act by restricting and manipulating scientific research, by narrowing the review process, and by hiring underlings dedicated to its destruction. And now Republicans in Congress, who realize they could lose their majorities in the November midterm elections, are threatening to join the wrecking crew with a host of destructive amendments that would further weaken the act.

Sept. 19, 2018 -Identifying matching elephant DNA in different shipments of tusks can help scientific sleuths connect the shipments to the same ivory trafficking cartel, a new study finds. That technique has already revealed the presence of three major interconnected cartels that are active in Africa, researchers report September 19 in Science Advances.

Sept. 6, 2018 — One fine Hawaiian day in 2015, Geoff Zahn and Anthony Amend set off on an eight-hour hike. They climbed a jungle mountain on the island of Oahu, swatting mosquitoes and skirting wallows of wild pigs. The two headed to the site where a patch of critically endangered Phyllostegia kaalaensis had been planted a few months earlier. What they found was dispiriting.

Essay by Rachel Clark: Sept. 5, 2018 — Early this summer, riding ocean swells just west of Washington State’s San Juan Island in a whale-watching vessel and scanning the waves for a glimpse of glistening black fins, I found myself in a difficult place.

Some chaperone-coordinators and I had brought a group of low-income, “first-generation-to-college” high-school students all the way from north Idaho to see the Southern Resident killer whales, our region’s iconic orca. The students had spent the previous two weeks learning about this unique population of whales in our program’s pilot curriculum, Killer Whales, Salmon & You. From the looks on their faces, our group of youth — many grappling with intensely stressful situations in their lives — obviously felt invested in seeing these whales.

Sept. 1, 2018 — The terrain in Budo-Su-ngai Padi National Park in southern Thailand is so steep in places that you can reach out and touch the path in front of you. With each step on the rain-drenched ground, you risk sliding back down. Insects buzz in nose and ears, and if you stop long enough to look around, you’ll see an army of land leeches inching their wormy, blood-hungry little bodies toward you.

Aug. 30, 2018 -The vast majority of lemur species are on the edge of extinction, experts warn. But not every lemur species faces a grim future. There may be as many as 1.3 million white-fronted brown lemurs still in the wild, for example, and mouse lemurs may number more than 2 million, a Duke-led study has shown.

In a study published August 30 in the Journal of Biogeography, researchers show that lemurs are less abundant in areas that lack certain tree species -- even when environmental conditions such as temperature, precipitation and elevation are otherwise suitable.

Using this relationship, the team was able to come up with the first estimates of total population size for some lesser-known species, such as Crossley’s dwarf lemur. These estimates can be critical baseline data for managing what’s left.

GRIMSEY ISLAND, Iceland, Aug. 29, 2018 — Puffins are in trouble.

The birds have been in precipitous decline, especially since the 2000s, both in Iceland and across many of their Atlantic habitats. The potential culprits are many: fickle prey, overfishing, pollution. Scientists say that climate change is another underlying factor that is diminishing food supplies and is likely to become more important over time. And the fact that puffins are tasty, and thus hunted as game here, hardly helps.

Aug. 10, 2018 -A team of whale experts has injected an ailing orca with antibiotics in a rare emergency effort to save her.

NOAA Fisheries says the international team reached 3½-year-old orca known as J50 Thursday in the waters near Washington state’s San Juan Island.

A veterinarian examined the orca. The team of experts gave her a dose of antibiotics through a dart and took a breath sample to help assess whether she has an infection.

Aug. 9, 2018 -A gene that helps mammals break down certain toxic chemicals appears to be faulty in marine mammals — potentially leaving manatees, dolphins and other warm-blooded water dwellers more sensitive to dangerous pesticides.

The gene, PON1, carries instructions for making a protein that interacts with fatty acids ingested with food. But that protein has taken on another role in recent decades: breaking down toxic chemicals found in a popular class of pesticides called organophosphates. As the chemicals drain from agricultural fields, they can poison waterways and coastal areas and harm wildlife, says Wynn Meyer, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Pittsburgh.

Aug. 4, 2018 -People are quick to recognize lemurs, thanks in no small part to the "Madagascar" franchise. Despite their impressive media profile, however, nearly every species of lemur is in danger of extinction.

Those are the provisional findings of a recent lemur workshop led by the IUCN Species Survival Commission Primate Specialist Group (PSG), and the findings have resulted in the reclassification of 105 species as either critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable on the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species.

"This is, without a doubt, the highest percentage of threat for any large group of mammals and for any large group of vertebrates,"said Russ Mittermeier, chief conservation officer for Global Wildlife Conservation and chair of the PSG.

Aug. 3, 2018 -Ruben de Kock has been training South Africa’s park rangers for over two decades — but last month was the first time one of his former students was killed on the job.

The July 19 incident, in which 34-year-old Respect Mathebula died in a shootout, marks the first instance in 50 years of a ranger being killed by poachers in Kruger National Park. Yet given the intensity of rhinoceros poaching in the region, the milestone is as surprising as it is tragic.

Aug. 2, 2018 -Last week angry headlines around the world decried the news that the Trump administration had issued trophy-import permits for 38 lions killed by 33 hunters — including many high-rolling Republican donors — between 2016 and 2018.

Lions (Panthera leo leo) have experienced massive population drops over the past two decades. The big cats gained some protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2016, but the Obama-era regulations still allowed some hunting and trophy imports as long as the host countries could prove that their hunts were sustainable. The Trump administration did away with that requirement last year and instead decreed that it would allow imports on a “case-by-case basis.”

Aug. 1, 2018 -What was once the king of the king penguin colonies has lost 85 percent or more of its big showy birds since the 1980s, a drop perhaps big enough to shrink the whole species population by a third.

In its glory days, an island called Île aux Cochons in the southern Indian Ocean ranked as the largest colony of king penguins. Satellite data suggest numbers peaked at around 500,000 breeding pairs amidst a total of 2 million birds in the 1980s, says seabird specialist Henri Weimerskirch based at University of La Rochelle with CNRS, the French national research service.

July 21, 2018 -What would happen if there were no mosquitos? Would anyone or anything miss them? Nature put this question to scientists who explore aspects of mosquito biology and ecology, and unearthed some surprising answers.

There are 3,500 named species of mosquito, of which only a couple of hundred bite or bother humans. They live on almost every continent and habitat, and serve important functions in numerous ecosystems. "Mosquitoes have been on Earth for more than 100 million years," says Murphy, "and they have co-evolved with so many species along the way." Wiping out a species of mosquito could leave a predator without prey, or a plant without a pollinator. And exploring a world without mosquitoes is more than an exercise in imagination: intense efforts are under way to develop methods that might rid the world of the most pernicious, disease-carrying species (see 'War against the winged').

July 19, 2018 -The Internet has revolutionized the way the world exchanges and consumes ideas, information and merchandise. However, it also has its drawbacks. The Internet has facilitated illegal trade in wildlife, which is having a devastating impact on animals, ecosystems and the communities who rely on them.

July 19, 2018 -The Trump administration is proposing key changes to the Endangered Species Act. It’s a move conservation groups say could greatly weaken the way animals and plants are protected.

The changes could limit how critical habitat is designated. It would also rollback the protections for threatened species. Instead of extending automatic protections to threatened species, those kinds of decisions would be made on a case-by-case basis.

July 16, 2018 -Damien Mander has thought a lot about best practices for protecting wildlife.

As the Australian-born founder of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation, Mander has spent the past 10 years working on the front lines protecting rhino and other wildlife in four African nations. For most of that time his work in this dangerous arena took what he calls “a fairly military approach.” That’s not surprising considering his prior decade-long career with governmental and private military organizations.

More recently, however, he began to wonder if maybe “we’ve done it wrong all these years.”

July 11, 2018 -International rights group Avaaz says the illegal ivory trade is still alive and well in Europe after the group purchased 109 ivory products from 10 countries and found that many of these items were illegally sourced from wildlife after 1989. The findings further support Avaaz’s mission in calling on Europe to completely end its ivory trade and protect elephants.

July 10, 2018 -Climate change could make a showy invasive milkweed called a bloodflower even more of a menace for monarch butterflies than it already is.

Monarch caterpillars, which feed on plants in the milkweed family, readily feast on Asclepias curassavica. Gardeners in the southern United States plant it for its showy orange blooms, yet the species “is turning out to be a bit of a nightmare,” says Mark Hunter of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

July 4, 2018 -When Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act on December 28, 1973, it made the United States the only nation on Earth to declare a basic right of existence for species other than our own. Currently, the law protects more than 1,600 species across the country.

Now Republicans in Congress are considering several bills they say would “modernize” the Endangered Species Act to make it more business-friendly and prevent the public from suing the federal government to protect species. Some Democrats and conservationists say bills like this would diminish the law’s ability to protect wildlife from extinction.

July 4, 2018 - For the first time, rhinoceros embryos have been made in the lab. Scientists injected preserved sperm from a male northern white rhino into eggs of female southern white rhino, a closely related subspecies. The embryos were incubated until the cells begin to differentiate, a stage at which they can be implanted into a surrogate mother, researchers report July 4 in Nature Communications.

July 3, 2018 -Narwhals, or the “unicorns of the sea,” could be at risk from additional Arctic shipping routes as polar ice continues to recede. A peer-reviewed study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests as many as seven marine mammal species may face new threats and uncertain consequences from increased ship traffic.

July 1, 2018 -John Wigginton, machete at the ready, chopped his way through the thick understory of privet, sumac and blackberry brambles one recent June afternoon. Logging trucks, bunchers and skidders rumbled in the distance. It had rained heavily; mosquitoes and deer flies accompanied Wigginton on his march through the forest.

"This," he said upon reaching a sandy overlook populated with well-aged hardwoods, "is Tallatchee Creek. It is a great stream. And we are protecting it in perpetuity. There's not much more we can do for the channel, except put more species in it.